Electronic mail or email and chat are widespread software tools for communicating among computer users. Email enables users to communicate asynchronously, whereas chat communication occurs synchronously. On occasion, users are unable to engage in synchronous chat because one of the parties is not online or his computer system lacks chat capability. In such situations, the users may resort to email to conduct a chat-like conversation. When using email to conduct a chat, a user may type his brief message into the subject header, because chat messages are characteristically brief, leaving the body of the email message empty. Transmitting email messages without content, however, wastes bandwidth. Further, chats typically involve a series of many brief messages, which, when conducted with email messages, only increases the amount of bandwidth needed to carry email traffic with no content. Email messages also tend to remain for considerable periods in a user's mailbox, thus occupying local computer and server memory for what is, in effect, blank content. There is, therefore, a need for a system and method that can use email for chat-like communications can without the aforementioned disadvantages.